Does the freezing occur over time, or does it happen right away?
If this happens over time, it could be heat related. Computers, whether they are laptops or desktops, cannot run when they get hot because the components will actually die inside them. To prevent this from happening, modern computer components such as your video chip and your CPU will slow down. By slowing down, they will run cooler and that saves their life. If they get too warm, beyond what slowing down can do, they will actually turn themselves off.
How to clean fans:
Purchase some canned air, which you can get at an office supply store such as Staples or even at places such as BestBuy. If you are concerned about the environment, you can get a "Rocket"
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/259157-REG/Giottos_AA1900_Rocket_Air_Blower.html
The advantage of the Rocket is you can purchase once and use hundreds of times unlike the single or few-use canned air, besides, they cost about the same as a few cans of air. 🙂
Cleaning the computer:
Get some twist ties and stick them into the fan to prevent the fan from spinning ***; just be careful that they don't fall inside. Twisting one end into a knot will prevent this from happening.
Blast the air through all the openings in the laptop. This strong blast of air will blow out the dust and remove it from the insides.
*** The reason for the twist tie is to prevent the fan from spinning at all. We don't want to force the fan to spin too quickly with the blast of air because that can break the fans not only by breaking off the blades (a rare event but it happens), but also internally by breaking the bushings.
With a desktop computer it's a bit easier because the sides can come off, but blocking the fan from spinning is still necessary. With the side off, be careful not to touch any components because that can zap the components with static electricity.
And... Never, ever, ever, use a vacuum cleaner to remove the dust and dirt from a computer. Vacuum cleaners can generate static electricity, especially with the new plastic ones, and that will damage your computer as in kill it instantly!
If you are afraid to do this, bring your computer to a professional or have a computer expert you know assist you.
When was the last time you defragged your hard drive? If you have an SSD, this isn't necessary, but this should be done often if you use the computer a lot and have a mechanical drive (older hard drive). You may have Windows set to do this automatically weekly, but if your computer is off at the time it won't run. Plan on a defrag at least twice a week. I run mine every couple of days because I do a lot of gaming and other things with my computer.
And finally... How much disk space? If your drive is full, Windows may not be able to handle the swap-space well so the computer will slow down. As a computer operates, it can't fit everything into RAM memory (Chips/DIMMs). In order to get around that, the operating system, aka Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc., will swap stuff from memory to disk so that other higher priority programs can run faster. If there's not enough disk space, the computer will spend a lot of time shuffling stuff around as it tries to fit the stuff on the disk. The same can happen if your computer doesn't have enough RAM installed, but that's most likely not the case if things were working well before.
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